“In the first place, that argument cuts both ways. Otis
said
he killed his father to protect his brother.”
“The abuse those kids suffered was never in question.”
“So? That doesn't mean that's why he killed his old man. If that was really his motive, why didn't he do it sooner? Maybe—-just maybe—Otis is a born killer. And maybe he figured that since he got away with it the first time, he could get away with it again.”
“I don't buy it.”
“The jury sure as hell did.”
She fell silent then, her moment of clarity apparently lost in an alcohol-induced haze. At least for now.
When he'd first met Carissa Stover, he'd loved having this kind of discussion with her. She was a brilliant woman who knew how to argue substance without taking it personally. Their disagreements had exhilarated him.
Until they started arguing about Otis. Their disagreement over that case and its aftermath had brought out in harsh relief all the flaws in their relationship. And the arguments had grown personal. Too personal.
As the case had wound toward its conclusion, Carissa had become increasingly stressed and impossible to live with. She flared over every little thing, and he was already too bruised to take any more of it. He whipped himself enough. He didn't need her to whip him, too.
He shook his head now, not wanting to remember how ugly it had become.
At sixty-five, the Taurus ate up the miles to Feather Sound. Finally he had to speak to her again, much as he would have preferred to drop her off without saying another word.
“Carey?”
“Mm.”
“What exit do I take?”
“Clearwater.”
“Okay.”
She sat up straighter, and when it came time, she directed him into the entrance of her development. She had one of those fancy new town houses that he'd read about recently in the paper. Radio sure did pay well. This place was above his touch as a cop.
Her town house was one of the smaller ones, though. She had probably paid ninety to a hundred grand for it. Not extravagant, he decided. And maybe radio didn't pay all that well after all.
“You wanna come in?” she asked.
“Why?” He told himself he wanted to get home and go to bed. He told himself the last thing on earth he wanted to do was spend another minute with Carissa Stover. But he found himself climbing out of the car into the pouring rain and walking around to help her out. He justified it by reminding himself she was drunk He had to make sure she got safely inside.
She'd begun to sober up, he realized. She was steadier on her feet as they walked toward her door. She couldn't manage the key herself, though, so he snatched it out of her hand and shoved it into the lock.
Thunder boomed, rolling in from a long way away. Lightning flickered, for an instant overpowering the yellow glow of the porch light, illuminating her face in harsh relief. What he saw was painful to behold.
“Christ!” he said under his breath, and shoved the door open, pushing her through it ahead of him. He was glad to close the night and the storm outside. He didn't need it to play any more tricks with her face. He didn't want to feel anything for this woman, not even pity.
She was already walking away from him, toward a winding staircase, pulling her sweater over her head as she went, giving him a breathtaking view of her slender back and the white of her bra.
“Damn thing prickles like a cactus shirt,” she muttered as she climbed the stairs, dropping the sweater on the first riser. “Make some coffee, Rourke.”
He just stared at her, disbelieving. What the hell had happened to the sometimes shy, always modest woman he had known?
Life.
The word floated into his mind like a curse. Life. Just the way it had happened to him. She'd been little more than a girl back then. Now she was a woman. Maybe even a virago. Life had a habit of twisting people in the damnedest ways.
Dragging his eyes from her before she rounded the bend in the stairs and gave him a sideways view of her full breasts in the white cradle of her bra—a view that he knew would confirm he still craved her—he turned, trying to figure out where the kitchen was stashed.
He found it at the back of the entryway, through a door that opened just beneath the upper landing of the stairway. It was a nice kitchen, not too big but not too small. He remembered how she had often complained that architects had sacrificed the kitchen to the needs of people who dined out five nights a week. This kitchen was meant to be cooked in, and even had a cozy little breakfast nook with a bay window.
So, he thought, she had her kitchen. He wondered if she ever used it. Because all the while she'd complained about tiny kitchens in modern construction, she'd complained just as loudly about how miserable it was to cook for one.
The coffeemaker was on the counter, and beside it the same glass jar she had always kept coffee in. He found the filters in the cabinet above. She had always been logical in her organization. That much hadn't changed.
As he spooned coffee into the machine, he found himself remembering how appalled she'd been by the utter lack of order in his home. He'd told her that he used it all up on his work, and didn't have any left over for his house. She'd laughed then. He wondered if she would laugh now.
Then he told himself he didn't care.
The coffee was almost finished by the time she reappeared in dry clothes, white slacks and a navy blue top. She'd brushed out her damp dark hair and caught it up in a clasp on the back of her head. He had to keep himself from sucking air at the sight of her slender neck. For some reason, that had always turned him on.
She sat at the table and put her head in her hands. “God, I've got a headache.”
“Hangover.”
“Already?”
“Yup. Where's the aspirin?”
“In the cabinet over the sink.”
He brought her three, along with a glass of tap water.
She tossed them off like a shot of whiskey. “So tell me about your father.”
“What's to tell? He's my father. I have one like most of the rest of the world.”
She looked at him from hazel eyes, eyes that had always seen too damn much. He'd once fancied that when she cross-examined witnesses, they felt as if she could see straight to their souls—which was probably why so many of them blurted out things that their attorneys wished they'd left unsaid. “You're evading the question, Rourke.”
“Damn straight, Stover.”
“So, another big, dark secret from your past?”
“I didn't say it was a secret, dark or otherwise. It's just none of your damn business.”
She threw up a hand, as if to say, Have it your way.
He pulled out a couple of mugs and filled them nearly to the rim with steaming coffee. He was going to need the caffeine just to get home.
She took the mug from him with a nod of thanks, and he sat across from her, blowing on his coffee and waiting to see if she was going to try to push any more of his buttons. If he hadn't wanted the coffee so badly, he'd be out of there already.
She surprised him, though. Instead of staying on the attack, she sighed and wrapped her hands around the mug as if it were a warm fire on a cold night. Which maybe it was. Steamy as it was outside tonight, inside the air-conditioning was chilling him through his wet clothes.
She averted her face, staring off into space as if she couldn't bear to look at him. “I ought to be able to drop it.”
“Yup.”
“ I thought I had until I saw the bulletin from the AP wire tonight.”
“It'll go away again. But I'll tell you one thing—drinking isn't going to help a damned thing. It's a bad way to go, Carey. One way or another, it'll mess up your life.”
She looked at him with those X-ray eyes of hers. “It messed up your life, didn't it. A drunk driver killed your baby.”
God, the woman had an absolute talent for throwing his past in his face, for raking up things that shouldn't be raked up. It might have made her one of the best young prosecutors in the State Attorney's Office, but it sure as hell made her intolerable to live with. What was she trying to do? Hurt him as bad as she was hurting?
Well, he thought, taking a swig of coffee, she'd succeeded, but he was damned if he'd let her know it.
“I wasn't going to drive,” she said, apparently oblivious of her transgression. “I was going to sleep it off.”
“Mm.” He didn't trust himself to speak.
“I'm not that stupid, Seamus. Honestly. I've seen victims, too.”
Maybe she had, maybe she hadn't. He wasn't going to argue it. What he wanted was to finish his coffee and get the hell out of there.
She rose and went to get the coffeepot, returning with it to top off both their mugs. “I'm sorry I wrecked your evening,” she said as she put the pot back on the warming plate.
His evening had been wrecked from the minute he'd opened the door to see his dad standing there. What did one more drunk matter? “I listen to your radio show sometimes,” he said, wanting to change the subject
now.
“Yeah?” She resumed her seat and gave him a pinched smile that didn't reach her eyes. “Crusader for truth and justice, that's me. Holding back the abysmal tide of ignorance about our justice system with a broom.”
He shrugged and sipped coffee. No subject was safe with her tonight.
“I'll bet it really chaps your hide when I talk about how cops lie.”
He sucked air through his teeth. “Nope.”
“Really? I thought you were a crusader for truth and justice, too.”
“I'm a crusader for justice. There isn't any truth.”
“Ahh. So lying is okay?”
“I didn't say that.” He could feel his temper heating again. “And this isn't your goddamn talk show, so don't get smart with me. Evidence is all we have. The truth is unknowable.”
He shoved back from the table, deciding he'd had enough of her. “Have a nice life,
Ms. Justice
.”
He headed for the door, and heard her following him. The sweater, he noticed, was still lying on the first stair, abandoned and forgotten.
As he opened the door, he turned his head and saw her staring at him, her eyes wide and hollow-looking, her arms folded tightly across her breasts as if she were cold to the bone.
“Don't you get it, Rourke?” she said softly. “Without truth, there is no justice.” Exactly the words she had spoken when she had told him she was quitting the prosecutor's office.
He didn't even say good night. He stepped out into the warm, muggy air and felt the raindrops pick up where'd they'd left off. If he never saw her again, it would be too damn soon.
Carey stood where he'd left her, listening to the slam of the car door and the roar of his engine as he drove off.
Finally, moving as if through molasses, she got her coffee mug from the kitchen and went to the living room, where she turned on all the lights, put some quiet music on the stereo, and collapsed in the recliner. It had once been her dad's chair, and she still found comfort sitting in it.
But tonight there was little comfort to be had. The storm battering her windows didn't come close to the storm battering her mind.
John William Otis was going to die.
She forced herself to face it, to turn the idea around in her mind, much as she wanted to shy away from it. He was going to die, and it was going to be as much her fault as anyone's. She wondered if she'd feel any different if she were absolutely convinced of the man's guilt but she had no way of knowing. Otis had been her first and last death-penalty case. All she could know was that she had done her job despite her feelings about the case, and a man was going to die. Because of her.
Stupid of her to have thought that Seamus might be the one person on earth who could understand how she felt. He'd always had a simplistic concept of the justice system: If the jury said it was so, it was so. He even seemed able to accept that when the verdict went against him.
To hell with it, she thought. She'd been running around in circles on this for years, and she was fed up to the gills with the whole question.
John William Otis was going to die, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it. Seamus Rourke didn't give a damn about it, and she couldn't change that either.
He had looked older, she thought suddenly. Five years had added some gray to his dark hair, and lines to his face. Even his gray-green eyes looked older, as if they had seen almost too much to bear. He looked tired. Haggard.
And impatient. She didn't remember him being so impatient, at least not until the end, when they had seemed to be fighting all the time.
She sighed, and felt the aspirin drive out the last of the headache. The alcohol fog was fading, too, leaving her clear-headed, wired on caffeine, and all too aware of her shortcomings.
She wasn't happy with herself, but there was nothing new in that. It had been a long time since she had been happy with herself.
Life, she thought, was an absolute bitch.
21 Days
T
he blazing afternoon sun filled the air with moisture from last night's rain. By the time Carey completed the short walk from her car to the station door, a sheen of perspiration already covered her face, and her hair clung damply to the base of her neck. It was a relief to step into the chilly air of the small reception room.
Becky Hadlov, the receptionist, sat at her desk, talking cheerfully on the phone. Becky had once cherished the hope of becoming a TV news anchor. She had the blond good looks for the job, but not the voice. Disappointed dreams, Carey thought. The world was full of them.
A young couple sat in the chairs before the front window, talking in quiet voices while they waited for someone. Nervousness crackled in the air around them. Job interview?
Carl Dunleavy, the afternoon host, was on his way out, heading for his second job in his own business as an auto detailer.
It was a sad fact that radio didn't provide job security. Most everyone here had some kind of backup job, or worked for more than one station. Carey considered herself lucky in that her ratings and the syndication of her show on a hundred other stations gave her a nice income. But all of it could dry up as fast as she could say “ratings.”